NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING?

LIBERTARIAN MONKS has, through the months, been rough on the pop “conservative” movement. Still, one American conservative, National Review Online editor, Jonah Goldberg — not given to conventional bromides — is a welcome relief to the banal and nonsensical commentary slopping around the bowl of political punditry.

In Goldberg’s recent column, he makes some observations conservatives and libertarians would do well to pay attention to.

Goldberg writes,

[The] nature of President Obama’s bind is becoming clear. The best defenses of his administration require undermining the rationale for his presidency.

“We’re portrayed by Republicans as either being lying or idiots. It’s actually closer to us being idiots.” So far, this is the administration’s best defense.

It was offered to CBS News’ Sharyl Attkisson by an anonymous aide involved in the White House’s disastrous response to the attacks in Benghazi, Libya.

Well-intentioned human error rarely gets the credit it deserves. People want to connect the dots, but that’s only possible when you assume that all events were deliberately orchestrated by human will. This is the delusion at the heart of all conspiracy theorists, from Kennedy assassination crackpots to 9/11 “truthers.”

Behind all such delusions is the assumption that government officials we don’t like are omnicompetent and entirely malevolent. The truth is closer to the opposite. They mean well but can’t do very much very well.

We’ve featured similar averments on LB. In fact, both Mr Capehert and I’s attacks on “libertarian” blowhard Alex Jones and his conspiracy theory horseshit, presupposes Goldberg’s brilliant insights.

Moreover, such conspiracy theories do not address the nature of the U.S. Government and its need of total reform along constitutional parameters.

Conversely, Goldberg’s last two paragraphs posit a dramatic narrative all classical liberal argumentation should strive to articulate; a rebuke of extra-constitutional conceptions of governmental scope and authority. This dramatic narrative must be the basis of classical liberal appeal to voters.

Be it said. If the civil magistrate is prone toward well-intentioned, but destructive error, it would be an irrational takeaway by free, sovereign individuals to hand more power than the U.S. Constitution grants to those occupying the corridors of power.

It would be a selling of our penultimate, but civil birthright. James Madison said as much in Federalist 45.

Let us consider. Pres. Obama is not a wrecking ball of economic and American institutions because of a malevolent secret pledge. No, Pres. Obama is the coffee-coloured wrecking ball he is because his progressivism empowers, aids and abets big government — and big government, while launched for good, needlessly erects destructive consequences, denuding liberty and freedom of choice.

Worse. Big government shelters those in power from accountability and hinders reform of civil institutions. We learn this historically, but also from the horse’s mouth in recent weeks. In essence, massive overreach by the federal government occurred in the U.S. Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service. No debate on the ground of facts exist between Democrats and Republicans. Both parties, publicly, are outraged.

But when asked for an explanation by Congress, those involved — those whose lifeblood flows from bloated, big government, keep endlessly silent.